On Hating the Jews

The inextricable link between anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism.

By

Natan Sharansky

Updated Nov. 17, 2003 11:59 p.m. ET

No hatred has as rich and as lethal a history as anti-Semitism--"the longest hatred," as the historian Robert Wistrich has dubbed it. Over the millennia, anti-Semitism has infected a multitude of peoples, religions and civilizations, in the process inflicting a host of terrors on its Jewish victims. But while there is no disputing the impressive reach of the phenomenon, there is surprisingly little agreement about its cause or causes.

Indeed, finding a single cause would seem too daunting a task--the incidence of...